I love the smell of data in the morning!
Interesting and surprising statistics about digital media and devices. Compiled & curated by Dan Calladine, Aegis Media - dan.calladine@aemedia.com -
All views expressed are my own. Please email me if you have any queries, amendments or suggestions. Follow me on twitter - I'm @dancall

Saturday, 20 December 2008

"Average user has 100 friends on the site2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)More than 13 million users update their statuses at least once each dayMore than 2.5 million users become fans of Pages each dayMore than 700 million photos uploaded to the site each monthMore than 4 million videos uploaded each monthMore than 15 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each monthMore than 2 million events created each monthMore than 19 million active user groups exist on the site"Source: Facebook Press Statistics, retreived 20th December 2008Updated here

Tuesday, 16 December 2008

Barack Obama has nearly 150,000 twitter followers (although he hasn't updated since he won the Presidential election). His most recent tweet was"We just made history. All of this happened because you gave your time, talent and passion. All of this happened because of you. Thanks" on 5th November.

Friday, 12 December 2008

"In Helsinki, Finland 57% of public transport single tickets are paid by mobile. In Croatia over half of all parking is paid by mobile. In South Africa you can have your paycheck paid directly to the mobile phone account linked to your mobile banking account. In Soweto a barbershop has more than half of its customers paying by mobile. 20% of London’s congestion charge is paid by mobile. In Slovenia every vending machine, every McDonald’s restaurant, and every taxicab accepts payment by mobile phone. In Kenya the maximum limit of mobile-to-mobile money payments is set to 1 million U.S. dollars per single transaction. And in South Korea, all credit card companies enable their credit cards to the owners’ mobile phones by default, offering to send an optional old-fashioned plastic credit card to the customer’s home address for free."Source: Figures quoted by Alan Moore on page 8 of his paper The Glittering Allure of the Mobile Society, November 2008

Thursday, 11 December 2008

YouTube was the top search result in Google for 11 major countries in 2008 - Austria, Finland, France, Hong Kong (OK, not a country), Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, & Taiwan. This is 11, out of a total of 34 countries reported on by Google.This shows two things - that YouTube is incredibly popular globally, and that people use search for navigational purposes - that is to find specific things that they already know (rather than type in a term like 'video site')Source: Google Zeitgeist 2008

Wednesday, 10 December 2008

"Digital recorded music sales grew by over 20% year-on-year in all our comparator countries except France and Italy. Mobile music downloads now account for over half of all recorded digital music revenue in France, Italy and Japan. In Japan, mobile accounts for over 90% of all digital music revenue, compared to 29% for the UK."Source: Ofcom International Communications Market 2008, November 2008(The whole report - over 300 pages - is available for free download here

"There are, as of Monday, 10,215 applications in the app store. The store is adding about 70 or so new applications every day.Of those apps, about 3,500 of them are games (games and entertainment categories). The average price is $3.13 with $0.99 being the most common price. Interesting how this has fallen over the past few months.It would cost almost $32,000 to buy every single app in the app store, but you would only be able to install 148 of them at a time. The least popular category is Weather with only 52 apps thus far.A the current pace, the iTunes App Store should hit 25,000 applications sometime around the 1 year anniversary of July 11, 2009."Source: 148apps blog, 29th November 2008, pre-empting Apple's announcement of 10,000 applications

"Apple has announced catalog and download numbers for iPhone applications in the form of a full-page ad that ran in Friday's edition of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.The ad, which can be seen after the page break, boasts that more than 300 million applications have been downloaded from a catalog that now tops 10,000 different apps."Source: Apple, in an ad in the NYT and WSJ, cited by CNET, 5th December 2008

Tuesday, 9 December 2008

"If there are on average between 10,000 and 15,000 avatars "living" in Second Life at any point, that means the world has a population of about 12,500. Supporting those 12,500 avatars requires 4,000 servers as well as the 12,500 PCs the avatars' physical alter egos are using. Conservatively, a PC consumes 120 watts and a server consumes 200 watts. Throw in another 50 watts per server for data-center air conditioning. So, on a daily basis, overall Second Life power consumption equals:

Which, annualized, gives us 1,752 kWh. So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. By comparison, the average human, on a worldwide basis, consumes 2,436 kWh per year. So there you have it: an avatar consumes a bit less energy than a real person, though they're in the same ballpark.Now, if we limit the comparison to developed countries, where per-capita energy consumption is 7,702 kWh a year, the avatars appear considerably less energy hungry than the humans. But if we look at developing countries, where per-capita consumption is 1,015 kWh, we find that avatars burn through considerably more electricity than people do.More narrowly still, the average citizen of Brazil consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian."Source: Nicholas Carr, 5th December 2006, on his blog Rough Type

Wednesday, 3 December 2008

"The distribution of PC Internet users was found to be relatively equal across each of the age groups studied [Under 25s, 25-34s, 35-44s, 44-55s, 55+s], with approximately one-fifth of the total audience coming from each segment. Mobile Internet usage, on the other hand, skewed substantially younger, with under-25-year-olds accounting for 30 percent of all users. Indeed, this age group represented nearly 50 percent more users than the 45-54 year old (11 percent) and the 55+ year old age groups (10 percent) combined. Mobile Internet users age 35 and under accounted for well over half (56 percent) of total users.One point of congruency occurred in the 35-44 year old age group, which accounted for a 23 percent share of total users in both the PC and mobile user-bases."Source: comScore UK PC & Mobile Internet Usage Report, December 2008

Monday, 1 December 2008

"From Q2 to Q3 2008, the number of Britons using mobile Internet increased by 25% (from 5.8 to 7.3 million) compared to 3% for PC-based Internet (34.3 to 35.3 million Britons).The mobile Internet audience has a higher concentration of younger users than PC-based Internet; 25% of mobile Internet consumers are aged 15-24 compared to 16% for PC-based consumers. Whilst, 23% of the PC-based Internet population is 55+, only 12% of the mobile Internet audience is"Source: Nielsen Online, 24th November 2008

"- 91% of mobile owners keep the phone within 3 feet, 24x7- Mobile is as addictive as smoking cigarettes. Removing mobile phones produces similar withdrawal pains as attempting to stop smoking.- Text-and-driving is more dangerous than stoned or drunk driving.63% of people are not willing to share their phone with our spouse.- 1 in 3 partners snoop inside the phone, mostly when we're in the shower. 10% of people ended relationships after this.- 1 in 4 British couples sleeps apart 1 night a week because of their partners addiction to Blackberry, phones, etc."Source: Tom Hume, 17th November 2008, quoting figures reported by Tomi Ahonen at the Future of Mobile conference in London

"To put that number into perspective, enough iPods have been sold to provide a personal 'Pod to every man, woman, and child in the United Kingdom, Australia, the Netherlands, Greece, Israel, Sweden, Austria, Chile, Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Greenland. And you'd still have enough leftover to give one to each fan attending Super Bowl XLIII eight days after the Mac turns 25."Source: RegisterHardware, 18th November 2008, citing Apple figures

"The original Gears Of War game was a massive success for the Xbox 360 console and now the new instalment, Gears Of War 2 (GOW2), looks like it may be even bigger, racking up sales of 2m in its first weekend.Not only does that make it one of the biggest ever openings on the console but it managed to smash the Xbox LIVE record for online activity too. More than 1.5 million people signed into Gears of War 2 during the weekend, racking up a total 15 million gameplay hours, setting a new record for concurrent LIVE players."Source: Gizmodo, 12th November 2008

"People are hungry for interactive mobile features worldwide, and Facebook users are no exception. Usage of our mobile products has grown from 5 million to 15 million active users since the beginning of the year. We have expanded our mobile team and are continuing to make improvements every day."Source: Facebook, 10th November 2008Update - as at early January 2009 this had risen to 21m

"According to The NPD Group, the leader in market research for the wireless industry, Apple’s iPhone 3G surpassed the Motorola RAZR as the leading handset purchased by adult consumers* in the U.S. in the third quarter (Q3) of 2008. RAZR had been ranked by NPD as the top-selling consumer handset for the past 12 quarters."Source: NPD Group, 10th November 2008

"In October, Opera Mini was used by approximately 21 million users, a 10.6% month-on-month increase from September 2008 and more than 311% compared to October 2007"Source, Opera, makers of the world's most popular mobile browser, November 2008

"6.9 million iPhone units were sold in the quarter, more than in all previous quarters combined. After just 15 months in the mobile phone business, Apple outsold RIM in the September quarter. 6.1 million BlackBerry handsets were sold. Measured by revenue, Apple is now the third largest mobile phone supplier, after Nokia and Samsung"Source: Thomas Husson of Jupiter Research, 22nd October 2008, citing an Apple earnings statement

"MySpace’s Jamie Kantrowitz stated there had been in the US alone 40m streams in the first seven days after launch of MySpace Music, with 17-18 streams per person."Source: Mark Mulligan of Jupiter, 10th October 2008, citing data given by MySpace at the Popkomm conference

"In a statement designed to highlight its self-appointed status as the "preferred stage" for music-based games "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band," Microsoft released data showing gamers, on average, buy 3.8 million songs a month, for either game, and have bought more than 45 million tracks for both to date, across all installments of the respective franchises."Source: Billboard, 20th October 2008, citing Microsoft

"We recently hit a really cool milestone, our users have now uploaded over 10 billion photos to the site. Now, that’s a big number, but we actually store four image sizes for each uploaded photo, so that’s over 40 billion files.To celebrate, we got a bunch of cupcakes and handed them out to our engineering and operations groups. One of our engineers calculated that if we had gotten one cupcake for each of our photos, and lined them up side by side, the line could reach halfway to the moon.Here’s some other interesting recent stats on photos:- 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day- We have just over one petabyte of photo storage- We serve over 15 billion photo images per day- Photo traffic now peaks at over 300,000 images served per second"Source: Facebook, 15th October 2008

"Teens say texting has critical advantages because it offers more options, including multitasking, speed, the option to avoid verbal communication, and because it is fun – in that order. With more than 1 billion text messages sent each day, it is no surprise that 42 percent of teens say they can even text blindfolded, the study revealed"Source: Harris Interactive, 12th September 2008

"Bloggers have been at it an average of three years and are collectively creating close to one million posts every day. Blogs have representation in top-10 web site lists across all key categories, and have become integral to the media ecosystem."Source: State of the Blogosphere, Technorati, September 2008

"Members of Generation Y (ages 13 to 29) send an average of 20 textmessages daily, compared to just 2 for Generation X (30-43) and less than onefor Baby Boomers (44 to 64)"Source: Knowledge Networks, 18th September 2008